“So, to be clear, if I am terrified, I am doing it right?”
He laughed, “Yes.”
We had a substitute teacher today, and he was showing us very nonchalantly the one skating move that has kept me awake at night, that I have done my best to forget, that I had prayed for some magical ability to accomplish whenever the time came.
But I was not ready. Not even close. Yet here we were: the dreaded crossover. And here he was in his hockey skates, breaking it all down as if it were possible, and we could do this without dying. He might as well have asked me to fly a plane.
For those unfamiliar with skating terminology, the “crossover” is exactly what it sounds like: as you move, you place one foot over the other and use that shift to propel yourself. You might see someone do one or several, forward or backward. We were just doing the forward ones. It was one of the few things I had seen skaters do that I could not even begin to fathom, despite my continued forward progress through Kettler’s adult skating program.
And, it threw me a bit that unlike our usual teacher, our substitute teacher was wearing hockey skates. I was becoming comfortable with the idea of sticking to figure skates for good. My love of hockey itself had not diminished—if anything, I was becoming a huge Caps fan, regularly attending games and watching everything I could about hockey on TV. But, truth be told, my confidence in my ability to ever play that game was not high.
However, skating itself made sense to me, felt good to me, and my improvement remained steady. My hockey skates now glowered at me accusingly from a basement corner, and I did my best to ignore them. Now here was hockey guy to shake me out of my figure skating stupor with his sassy skates and insouciant attitude toward my private terror.
As I have found with pretty much all hockey players I have ever met, I instantly liked this guy—and I wanted to impress him. I was old enough to be his mother, but I sure as hell was going to give it a shot, the potential painful spill be damned. Many in the group were murmuring out-loud trepidation that I also felt. So I asked the obvious question and accepted his unsurprising answer.
For you see, to do crossovers, you have to suspend many things—disbelief, gravity, safety, your other foot—because for a very brief moment you are not touching the ice, you are shifting your weight, you are finding your balance, you are becoming more than you ever thought possible and changing your mind about what your possible really is.